Look a little angry? Accused of having a "resting bitch face"? Now, there's a drug for that: Botox. The early joke about Botox was that it froze faces. But increasingly, people are seeking a different effect: actually altering their expressions, and maybe even their emotions. We trace the story from the discovery that the deadliest toxin on earth could make a face look less "troubled," to a feminist professor's Botox investigation that turns personal.
Produced by Allison Behringer, Dan Bobkoff, Anna Mazarakis, and Amy Pedulla with help from Lydia Ramsey and Sarah Wyman.
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Transcript
Note: This transcript may contain errors.
DAN BOBKOFF: The Atmosphere Salon doesn't have a lot of atmosphere on the outside. It's in a red brick strip mall north of Boston. In the front you can get your hair or nails done. But through a door in the back, it looks more like a dentist's office.
There's one of those chairs that reclines to lie flat. A woman is lying still under a bright light. Her eyes are closed, her face calm. And a nurse named Jenny Erickson is sticking a needle into her forehead.
BOTOX PARTY: Easy as that?
There's also wine and cheese and music playing. It is a party after all. A Botox Party… a gathering for people who want to try it for the first time.
And while we're here, Jenny tells us a story that surprised us: about a client who wanted to have her facial expressions altered.
JENNY ERICKSON: She said to me, 'Everybody just thinks i'm angry: my kids, my family, at work, everywhere.'
And it was pretty quickly taken care of. I mean a couple pokes, and she was good to go. And she did - not immediately right there in the chair, but about 10 days later, she started with the emails and the calls. She wanted to come to see me. And yeah she was very overcome. Like almost tearful but she was so happy. Her husband even thanked me. It was awesome. Yeah. 'She's not mad anymore.' I'm like, she is, you just can't see it….[laughter]
DB: From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name. Brands you know, stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.
What if you could fine tune your expressions? Look a little angry? Now, there's a drug for that.
ALICIA FORBES: I heard about it, both Botox and the resting bitch face, and then decided to give it a try.
The early joke about Botox was that it made you look frozen. But as we learned, these days people are getting a different effect: it's actually changing their expressions, and maybe even their emotions.
Stay with us.
ACT 1
DB: This is what's going into foreheads at the Botox party in Massachusetts.
BOTOX PARTY: It's technically a neurotoxin. And what that means is it actually goes into a muscle and, for lack of a better word, paralyzes it. Stops the movement. Doesn't allow the muscle to move in that way anymore.
[TAPPING SOUNDS]
Right between the eyes, we call the glabella
DB: The amount of toxin is minuscule, but the effects can be dramatic.
Last year, about four million people received cosmetic injections, nearly all of them women. A typical treatment costs something like 2-300 dollars.
It's particularly popular in cities like Miami, where sociologist Dana Berkowitz is from.
DANA BERKOWITZ: I grew up in a in a neighborhood where it was not uncommon for girls to get nose jobs for their 16th birthday and then breast implants when they got into college.
DB: And yet what happened at a party back in 2006 still surprised her. She was back from grad school to see some old high school friends.
DANA B: One of my girlfriend's took us aside. And she said 'guess what I did today?' And we all said 'what?' And she said 'I got Botox' and we were absolutely flabbergasted. You know, I think we were about 27 or 28 years old at this point and she said 'well you all should start getting it too now.' She actually used the words it's really good for you.
DB: Dana was taken aback.
DANA B: I think my initial reaction was like 'that's something for older women that's something for you know, really rich women or really vain women.' I remember thinking my friend is absolutely bananas, she's so vain, she's just doing this because she has all this extra money and nothing to do with it. I mean, these are the things that was thinking of I would never do that.
DB: She couldn't stop thinking about how excited her friend was about her injections. In what world could Botox be good for someone in her 20s?
So, scholar that she is, Dana started researching. She started interviewing doctors and patients. She analyzed women's magazines and advertising. Roughly a decade later, all this research came together in a book called Botox Nation.
DANA B: Whenever I tell people that I wrote a book about Botox, the first question they ask me is: are you for it or against it? You know, is Botox good or bad and I try my best to explain to them that it's much more complicated than that.
DB: Botox is the most famous brand name for something called Botulinum Toxin. And before we started injecting it into our foreheads, it was something to fear.
In the 1800s, there had been a growing number of deadly food poisonings. Then in 1885, a Belgian physician was called to investigate after members of music band got sick and died after eating smoked ham at a funeral. The doctor was able to isolate and name the bacterium causing the illness: Botulinum.
Botulinum is the deadliest toxin on the planet. More toxic even than cyanide. The way it works is by paralyzing the body. Even in small doses, botulinum cased blurred vision, difficulty speaking. Death from botulinum is particularly gruesome—it basically paralyzes its victim from the inside—nervous systems fail, lungs stop functioning, death comes by suffocation.
So how did it go from something to fear to what some call a miracle drug? To understand that, you might want to meet a married couple from Vancouver, Canada.
JEAN CARRUTHERS: Hi, I'm Jean Carruthers, and I'm very pleased to meet you.
DB: Nice to meet you, too.
ALISAIR CARRUTHERS: And I'm Alastair Carruthers. I used to be a dermatologist, and then, various things have happened since then.
DB: What happened?
AC: Well, Botox happened, for a start. (laughs)
DB: Jean was a ophthalmologist and Alastair was a dermatologist. They're the kind of couple that finishes each others' sentences. And the kind of couple that brings work home. One day, Alastair came in and told Jean how he had just heard about a new surgery for skin cancer pioneered in San Francisco and he wanted to go down to learn how it works. That was great news for Jean. She wanted to study there with a guy named Alan Scott, who had a novel way of treating eyes that were sealed shut or spasming. He was injecting minute amounts of botulinum toxin.
JC: And sure enough, it relaxed those muscles. I was just so blown away. You could relax those muscles without surgery, and these people could pick up their lives, would go back to work, cross the street, have a social life. Which are things they couldn't do before.
DB: So after learning how it worked, Jean brought the botulinum science back to her practice in Vancouver and started using it to treat her patients.
AC: There was a period there were the toxin could only by used by certain physicians, and basically, it was Alan Scott in San Francisco, and Jean in Vancouver. So the people who wanted to be treated, who otherwise couldn't drive, couldn't dance, couldn't even watch the television. So they were showing up at the airport. And eventually, someone from Canadian immigration people phoned Jean and said, 'What are you doing for all these Americans who are showing up here and saying, 'we're here to see Dr. Jean?''
DB: Was that their accent?
JC: Yeah.
AC: Well, some of them. [laughter]
DB: This drug… the one we now call Botox …was strictly an experimental medical treatment then. Those patients were grateful that Jean could solve their eye problems with small doses of toxin. The dose makes the poison after all.
And then here's where the fact that an eye doctor married a dermatologist happened to change cosmetics forever.
It was 1987. Alastair was having trouble treating patients with deep lines between their eyebrows. It was Jean who accidentally discovered the solution.
JC: A patient came in, who I had been treating for blepharospasm, you know, the one where the eyes are tightly squeezed shut. And she got angry at me. Which was a really unusual thing, because most of the neuromodulator patients love you, because you totally fixed the problem that they'd been having to deal with.
So she said to me, 'you didn't inject me here,' pointing at the inner brow. So I said, 'I'm terribly sorry, but I didn't think you were spasming there.' And she said, 'I know I'm not spasming there, but every time you treat me there, I get this beautiful, untroubled expression.' And so, I just went home, and at dinner, I said, 'I think I have a solution to your frown line patient problem'
DB: The next day, Jean found a guinea pig to test her hypothesis that botulinum toxin could smooth out wrinkles…She tried it on her receptionist.
JC: She said, 'whatever, sure.' So I treated her. Alistair was a convert, right there.
DB: Because he was skeptical at first, right?
JC: Well, I mean, you gotta... He's a normal, careful human being. Who in their right mind would inject the most poisonous poison into somebody for such a quote unquote frivolous reason as injecting frown lines?
DB: Jean would. So she injected herself next.
DB: So when you looked in the mirror after that, what was your own reaction?
JC: I just thought how relaxed I looked. It's really, because I'm a fairly high-energy, intense person. And I was thinking, 'that looks a lot better.' (laughs)
DB: What was your reaction, Alistair?
AC: I realized that this was a winner. It was doing something that we'd never done before. We'd never realized that we could do it. So to actually have a treatment which could make people, not just look less wrinkled, but it's more profound than that, because they've found that they couldn't look stressed. They weren't worried. I had people say to me, 'I live in a different world.' And that's very profound.
DB: From the beginning, Jean and Alistair realized Botox had the power to alter expressions. It started with that first patient who said she got a beautiful, untroubled expression after treatment. And it continued when they recruited more patients for an early study.
JC: One was a computer salesman, who tracked his sales on his globular injections. So when they wore off, he looked, frankly terrifying, and nobody would buy from him. So that's, and the other thing we noticed was, in other occupations like teaching, teachers would come in and say, 'the kids are frightened of me, because I look like I'm frowning all the time.' And that's an important part of their career.
DB: Over the next decade, Jean and Alastair kept researching botulinum toxin for changing appearance. They presented it at conferences and got skeptical reactions. No one wanted anything to do with it at first. Even Allergan, the company that made it for eye treatments, was cautious about cosmetics.
But then the company got a new CEO, who saw potential in what the Carruthers were doing and pushed for more research and then finally in 2002, Botox Cosmetic was FDA approved and hit the market. And boy did it ever.
WILL AND GRACE CLIP: 'Rain skies are going to clear up!' 'Put on a happy face.' 'I can't!' 'Oh, life's a party with a face full of poison.'
DB: Here again is sociologist Dana Berkowitz who wrote Botox Nation.
DANA B: By the time that the FDA approved BOTOX for cosmetic use in 2002, at this point Allegan spared no expense and they wasted very little time. They began advertising the following month, committing about $50 million to a consumer ad campaign.
BOTOX AD: Wow! Worried about losing your wow? Ask your dermatologist or plastic surgeon about Botox Cosmetic. Or call for the name...
DANA B: Allergan was transformed from this relatively tiny pharmaceutical company that's basically sold acne products and eye drops to this huge influential player.
DB: Botox has competitors now, but it's still by far the most famous and popular brand of botulinum toxin. Botox made $2.2 billion for Allergan in 2017. And I was surprised to learn that more than half of that was for medical conditions, not cosmetic treatments. Even now, more people who get Botox get it for therapeutic reasons like muscle spasms, clenched jaws, excessive sweating, even overactive bladders. Treating migraines is a big one now… something dermatologists discovered by accident when cosmetic users reported fewer headaches.
And now it's being used to treat another epidemic.
ARCHIVAL: Bitch face.
Bitch face.
Resting bith face.
If you don't know what resting bitch face is it's when your face for no reason whatsoever looks like you just got a parking ticket. [laughter]
That's in a moment.
ACT II
DB: We're back.
DANA B: According to Urban Dictionary "resting bitch face" is a person, usually a girl who naturally looks mean when her face is expressionless without meaning to.
DB: This is Dana Berkowitz again. Botox expert, and women's studies professor at Louisiana State University.
DANA B: Botox's effect on facial expression is pretty enticing to women who from very early on, right, we're told to project cheerfulness and disguise to disguise unhappiness. We are penalized for looking judgmental, for looking angry, for looking cross right and nothing demonstrates this more than the that viral pop-cultural idiom "resting bitch face."
DB: And there's no equivalent of that for men is there?
DANA B: No absolutely not because we expect male politicians and CEOs to look pissed off and stern or annoyed but think about it when someone like Hillary Clinton displays the same expressions, she's chastised for being unladylike, for being undeserving of the male gaze, she's criticized. When a man looks severe serious or grumpy, we assume it's for good reason, but women are always expected to be smiling, to be aesthetically pleasing and to be compliant and you know, ask any woman how frustrating and annoying it is to walk down the street and be told to smile by multiple people. It happens to us constantly. It's exhausting and so, this is one of the reasons that I argue that Botox might be especially appealing to women. It can actually relieve them from having to work so hard to police their expressions.
DB: In Vancouver, Alicia Forbes felt that frustration. She was a shy kid and even through her twenties, she was often reminded that what she was feeling inside was not how the outside world was perceiving her. She works in the mortgage industry and remembers this one time a few years ago.
AF: I was processing an application on a computer and I had the client right in front of me and you know, I'm obviously, you know, concentrating everything like that, but I'm in good spirits and making small talk with them and and they're looking at me and they just kind of breaking conversation and they say what 'are you ok? Like am I doing something wrong? Are you mad at me?' Like like 'no. No, like I'm just I'm concentrating on what I'm doing and I'm just i'm listening to what you're saying' and everything like that and like 'You, you look like you're upset with something.' Like 'no. No, I'm good.' But being in a professional environment, they weren't able to actually use the word resting bitch face, but we both knew what they were talking about.
DB: This kind of thing kept happening to Alicia.
AF: I felt like people weren't getting the full idea of you know, who I am and how I was feeling. And I just think that you know, if I have the opportunity to you know show a truer face to the world, then I want to do that.
DB: Three years ago, when she was 28, Alicia started to think about Botox as a way to alter her facial expressions.
AF: I'd say that I started doing Botox just because I saw you know, social media and ads and things like that, you know that enticed me and made me realize that it was something that would be good for my resting bitch face.
DB: After she got Botox, even Alicia's parents commented that she looked more relaxed. And she told producer Allison Behringer that Botox changed her… made her both more confident and approachable.
AF: So I think that looking more approachable has guided me to be more approachable and as a result, I'm happy today.
ALLISON BEHRINGER: How did you meet your boyfriend?
AF: I picked my boyfriend up at a bar. Actually, you're sitting at a restaurant and we were both alone that day and I decided to initiate conversation with him over a salad because we were both alone and he wasn't in a good mood. So I wanted to you know, improve his day.
AB: What was your pick up line?
AF: (laughs) My pickup line...like I asked him how his salad was. And then one thing led to another we started talking about the business that I was working on why he was having, you know kind of a crappy day and one thing led to another and it was a very friendly great interaction and I gave him my number and told him to call me. Yeah, I was a definite score. I definitely think that that was the first time that I was so bold in that kind of scenario. Yes, and it paid off.
DB: Scientists believe that just the act of making a happy expression can actually make us happier. It's something called the facial feedback hypothesis. At a simple level, it means the act of smiling, for instance, can actually improve your mood. Possibly because it can change expressions, Botox is currently being studied as a potential treatment for depression. Allergan told us it's already in phase two trials.
Dana thinks it could help free many women from some anxiety.
But from her perspective, cosmetic Botox is still net-negative for women. She called it an "emotional lobotomy." And yet, as critical as Dana is about the negative effects of cosmetic Botox on our culture, her personal views are complicated.
DANA B: Yeah I have had some - lots of internal struggles with Botox. Through that the process of aging into my 30s and interviewing other women my age and who told me that Botox was just like, you know, the most amazing thing they'd ever done and they couldn't believe that I was writing a book about Botox and I hadn't tried it, my own mother told me 'how can you write a book about Botox and not try it?'
DB: It didn't help that she'd interview cosmetic surgeons and dermatologists and they'd point out lines on her face that could benefit from Botox. More and more, she was thinking maybe she would try it. But just once, just to try it.
DANA B: And I had interviewed this resident in dermatology, and she said to me you know, 'have you tried it yet?' And I said no and she was younger than me the resident. She was like, 'oh, I do it all the time. It's like actually I have a vial in my fridge and you can come over and I'll inject you.'
And so I said, 'okay. Can I bring a friend?' And she said yeah. So my friend and I drove to her house. It was summer in New Orleans, which is you know, excruciatingly hot and the resident was like eight months pregnant. So she answers the door in a bikini because she's at her pool and the two of us walk up stairs and she injects both of us in her kitchen in her bikini at eight months pregnant.
DB: So this is how Dana Berkowitz, feminist scholar who spent years studying Botox… finally tried it for herself.
DANA B: You know, I think I was just, I was really nervous at first and then I was really excited. And I think that's how a lot of first-time users feel is this odd sort of meshing of anxiety and and excitement.
DB: It takes a few days for Botox to do its thing. Lines softens. Frowns fade.
DANA B: But then I started to get all this feedback from other people telling me how good I looked and they were asking me 'oh, you know, did you get a haircut or did you go on vacation?' What's going on? And I think I'd gone to you know, a wedding where I saw some old friends and compliments just started flowing and I was like 'wow, maybe this really works.' And then the Botox starts wearing off. A few months later. And all of a sudden you can make those expressions again with your forehead, your face. And all of a sudden you can see those wrinkles again. And that's when I was like, 'Wait a minute. Am I going to get BOTOX again?'
DB: She did get Botox again and found it harder to justify to herself that it was all purely for the sake of research.
DANA B: I'd hid it from my students and I would make sure to get Botox on in the summer or during winter holiday so that if I was bruised at all, they wouldn't be able to see it or if my my face do, you know looked a little bit different they wouldn't be able to notice and so I hid it from my colleagues and my students for quite a while and then ultimately I ended up writing an essay called My Women's Studies Professor Uses Botox. What?
DB: But she stopped recently. Part of it has to do with the fact that she had a child.
DANA B: I want to show my baby the full range of facial expressions and emotions. Right now at least. And so I've decided that I will not be using Botox for for quite some time.
DB: For Jean and Alistair, the couple who helped discover cosmetic Botox, they've made it their life's work, and they both use it regularly. Alistair gets a little in his face and some to reduce underarm sweating. And Jean?
AC: Jean hasn't frowned since 1987, you should be aware.
JC: That's the truth.
DB: And you know what, Jean seems pretty happy. Alicia is too. And Alistair! More men are getting Botox to look more approachable these days, too.
What if this is all it takes to change how we feel on the inside? A few pricks of a needle, and you can both look happier and be happier. But doesn't that come at a cost, too? It's like literally forcing a smile. What if you feel sad or angry and can't show it?
And then there's the fact that Botox's market is getting younger and younger. A million millennials are expected to get a treatment like Botox in 2018. That's a lot of twenty and thirty somethings. Many of them get it thinking it'll prevent wrinkles, even though there isn't scientific evidence of that. And because Botox only lasts a few months, that means they're effectively signing up to spend hundreds of dollars every few months forever?
All this is what Dana keeps grappling with.
DANA B: Is it good for women or is it bad for women and you know at the end of the day, no, it's not good for women. It's not good for anyone. Even though it might be good for women temporarily right? Even if they are using Botox to maintain their competitive edge in their jobs or in their intimate relationships, ultimately, they're buying into and reaffirming a society that rewards a very narrow definition of women's faces and so you're sort of just like buying into your own demise, basically.
DB: But Botox has a powerful pull. She hasn't ruled out getting it for herself once again.
In a moment, three things we learned reporting about Botox that didn't make it into our main story… Including Brotox. Uncut is next.
ACT III
DB: Alright, it's time now for Household Name Uncut, which is the part of the show where we resurrect the things we learned during the reporting of this episode that didn't make it into our main story. And we have some special guests this week. We have Kevin Reilly, who's a senior producer over at Business Insider Today.
KEVIN REILLY: Hi.
DB: And we have Lydia Ramsey, a reporter on the Healthcare team here at Business Insider.
LYDIA RAMSEY: Hey, how's it going?
DB: And our producer Anna Mazarakis.
ANNA MAZARAKIS: Hello!
DB: Alright, so 3 quick stories for you. First up: Kevin Reilly has been a bit of a guinea pig in our office and he's looking a little different but I can't quite place why. What's different? Is it a haircut, Kevin?
KR: No. It does have to do with my face though. I recently got Botox.
DB: So is this brotox?
KR: That is what the media has dubbed it that is brotox - a rise of men getting botox themselves. I think it's a ridiculous name but whatever.
DB: Alright so what was your experience like?
KR: Well it's actually a pretty quick procedure. So I went to a plastic surgeon on the upper east side of Manhattan and I went in without knowing a whole lot of what I wanted to get done. I picked out a couple areas of my face that I didn't particularly like: crows feet, when you smile on the side of my eye the extra lines that are coming up there, also on my forehead some of the wrinkles. But these wrinkles that I have, some of them I felt were a part of my personality so I didn't know if I wanted them all erased or if - what I wanted done. So I went to her with an open mind and asked for her professional opinion of what I could get done.
So the first one was an eye filler, it's a gel that goes underneath the eyes that helps with the bags you might see, or the dark circles we get as we get older. And the other one was Botox itself, which I got on the side of my eyes and also between my eyebrows.
DB: So what do you think is the attitude toward men getting Botox right now?
KR: Before I got the procedure done, I had inquired to a bunch of my friends on Facebook and different, other social media outlets as to their opinions and it sparked quite a conversation and what I found is that a lot of people, especially men and women in their 30s are very open to this and were actually more curious to see what I would look like afterwards and were excited by it, as opposed to people that were outright against it.
DB: And has there been a big rise in men getting it?
KR: Since 2010, there's been about a 30% rise in the number of cosmetic procedures done for men alone.
DB: All kinds of cosmetic procedures.
KR: That's all of them. And Botox itself has seen - there's about half a million Botox procedures done on men every year. That was a 5% rise over the year before, and it's been a continuing trend that's becoming a bigger and bigger number
DB: So have you gotten any interesting reactions since you first got this?
KR: I've gotten a lot of reactions from people who already knew me, especially the ones that knew that I had gotten the procedure done. They made comments that I looked great, that it definitely was an improvement, which could also be kind of an insult too. But for the most part, it's generally been a very positive reaction.
LR: How do you feel about all this? I feel like i would be grappling with this inner conversation of 'do I want my face to look different? Do I not?'
KR: Absolutely. So since Botox is temporary, I wasn't really worried about having it done so much the first time. What's worrying me more than anything is the second time and third time and the fourth time. Do I want this to continue on or is there going to be something in me that says I don't need this so I'm only going to do it this one time and then it's going to fade away. Am I worried? Right now, no. but i'm worried that in 6 months I'm going to be staring at the mirror and wanting more.
LR: That's going to be an expensive habit.
DB: That's how it works, yeah. Next up is Lydia Ramsey, and you found that the company that makes botox, Allergan, has tried at least to find a novel way to keep its patents going. What exactly is going on ?
LR: So Allergan as a company has a couple of blockbuster drugs, Botox being one of them that makes about a couple billion dollars in sales for them. They also have this drug called Restasis and in 2017, this drug Restasis made about 1.5 billion in sales. It's a drug used for chronic dry eye, so it's a little eye dropper and you drop it in your eye. You look at the financials of it and it was about 50% of Allergan's business. So a big chunk of its business. Now it's starting to face generic competition from other folks in the industry and so kind of as an interesting effort, I don't know if I want to call it a last ditch effort, Allergan decided that it would transfer the patents from restasis to the Saint Regis Mohawk tribe, so basically now the Native American tribe owns the patents and this is a way for Allergan to keep some kind of sovereignty over it, and so they can't get it challenged in courts in the US.
DB: So Allergan transfers the patent but still has control over it somehow?
LR: Yeah so basically how it works down is for a set number of dollars a year, Allergan essentially licenses the drug from the St Regis tribe and this gives them kind of the ability to make the drug and all that great stuff, but it also puts the patents in a different bucket than traditionally Allergan would have to deal with. From how I understand the patent world, there are certain entities, including Native American tribes, that don't have to deal with the court system in the US in the same way that other parts do. And so if you can put your licenses and put your patents under one of those entities, you can keep it from other parts of the US system.
DB: So this actually worked?
LR: Well, not quite. So it's really kinda wonky here in the world of patents but the long and short of it is it was kind of a moot point to give these patents to the Mohawk tribe because in the end, they were invalidated and generic competition is iminent.
DB: Did the tribe benefit at least?
LR: Financially they still benefit. They still own the rights to the drug and so they're getting payments from Allergan, so it is a revenue stream for them. They loved it. They told CNBC 'can you put our phone number in your story because we really want to get the word out there that we want to do this with more pharmaceutical companies?' Because they're realizing, and they said this in the statement around then, that they can't just make revenue from the casino business, they want to diversify it like any company would, and this would be an avenue for that.
DB: Have any other pharmaceutical companies thought about doing this, tried to do this?
LR: Not as far as I've seen. I mean the blowback was immense. Analysts were calling it such a mistake, everyone was calling it a PR nightmare, people were really unhappy with Allergan when they did this.
DB: Can you imagine them trying this for Botox?
LR: I don't think it would need to. For whatever reason, it gets super wonky but there's this process called interparts review that I believe applies in this case to Restasis in a way that it wouldn't for Botox because Botox is a biologic drug. It's a bit different. It's all very complicated in the world of patents.
DB: Alright and finally, our producer Anna Mazarakis.
AM: So over the course of this episode, we've learned that the trend of Botox has gone from people thinking is it safe? Does it hurt? What will people think of me? And at the same time, I have found that there is another beauty regimen that women have gone through over the course of time that had similar concerns as it was becoming more and more popular. And that beauty regimen is dying your hair. So if we go back to 1909, when L'Oreal was founded, women were really scared to get their hair dyed. They thought it was going to be very painful, and so L'Oreal was actually founded under the name the French Harmless Hair Dye Company to really drive home the point 'this isn't going to hurt, you should try it.'
DB: So was nobody really dying their hair until 1909?
AM: No it was really not a thing that people did. So there was also the fear of perceptions of 'if I dye my hair, what will people think of me?' So these hair dye companies decided that if they wanted to get their products off the shelf, another thing that they could do is make women afraid of something else. And the thing that they decided to make women be afraid of is getting old!
DB: Oh no.
AM: So in 1943, Clairol had an advertisement, a print advertisement, that called gray hair, the heartless dictator. In 1943, when there were a few other heartless dictators in our world. And so around this time I found data that said about 7% of women were dying their hair. And then in the early 1950s, Clairol, the same company that called gray hair a heartless dictator, created a package so that you could dye your hair at home. So then at that point, you didn't have to go out in public and go to a hairdresser to dye your hair, you could do it in the comfort of your own home and nobody would have to know if you were getting your hair dyed. And at the same time, they had a TV ad where they had this voiceover man who said, does she or doesn't she?
CLAIROL AD: Does she or doesn't she?
AM: And then it ends at the end with
CLAIROL AD: Only her hairdresser knows for sure.
DB: Or maybe not even because she can do it at home.
AM: Exactly.
DB: So would people not talk about it? Were they trying to just hide the fact that they had gotten hair dye?
AM: Yeah it was this big secret and it was almost like gone are the fears of what people will think of you because nobody really knew for sure and yet, at the same time, even if people didn't know, we somehow have stats that say that by the 70s, more than 40% of women dyed their hair. And the most recent study that I found said that about 89% of women today dye their hair. So if you're asking yourself now, does she or doesn't she dye her hair? The answer is likely that she does dye her hair. But it's kind of funny to think how the changing perceptions of women dying their hair - I mean it took a very long time, but now it's almost like ingrained in our society that it's ok for women to dye their hair. And I wonder how that will change for Botox. And I think you know, while we've been reporting this episode, I hate to admit it, but I've been walking down the street, looking at people and thinking to myself, does she or doesn't she? [in unison]
DB: Does she or doesn't she?
AM: And as it becomes more and more popular, I wonder if just like with hair dye, progressively, the answer will probably be: she does.
DB: Alright, Kevin Reilly, Lydia Ramsey, Anna Mazarakis. Thank you.
KR: Thank you for having me.
LR: Thanks.
AM: Thank you.
CREDITS
DB: This episode was produced by Allison Behringer, Anna Mazarakis, Amy Pedulla, and me with a lot of help from Lydia Ramsey and Sarah Wyman.
Our lines were smoothed out by editor Gianna Palmer.
Sound design and original music by John DeLore and Casey Holford.
The executive producers are Chris Bannon, Laura Meyer, Jenny Radelet, and me.
Special thanks to Stacey Copeland, Mitchell Brin, Dhaval Bhanusali, and Jennifer Martin.
Household Name is a production of
Hi everyone. We just want to take a minute here to let you know that this episode marks the end of Season 1. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed producing all these unexpected stories. We're going to take a little break now, but we'll be back with a special holiday episode in just a few weeks. Then stick around for season 2 starting in mid-January, not long at all.
In the meantime, catch up on episodes you missed, leave a review and rating on Apple Podcasts or your favorite app.
And we'd love to hear from you. Send feedback and story ideas to householdname@insider.com